Hand Lettering and Calligraphy Learning

Over the last few months, I've started working on my hand lettering and calligraphy skills much more consciously and posting them to my instagram as a means of accountability. I have almost 200 followers so far, it keeps me motivated knowing that someone other than myself gets to watch my progress!  (you can follow me @emilyvanhoff if you're interested.)

Here are a few highlights. Mostly just little sketches, but I'm learning a lot and having so much fun!

Craft Fair!

On September 6 I received a mailing from Trinity (my alma mater) that told me there was going to be a vendor market at homecoming on October 5. Naturally, I signed myself up with a handful of my snowflake pattern books, some earrings, and very little else. Over the next month I designed, printed, and folded like a crazy person. I ordered stickers and buttons and business cards and envelopes and packaging and tried to keep my brain organized. Nothing like a deadline to seriously motivate me!

I'm really proud of what I managed to pull together in a month, and I hope to do more craft fairs soon! I don't often work with actual things (my etsy site is all e-mailed pdfs), so having all these objects and figuring out how to display them and package them was rather heavenly.

Business cards designed for the occasion.

Stickers / envelope seals 

Lots of button designs!

The rest of the images are all the cards I designed and had printed for the fair.

They Moved!

I designed a moving announcement for some lovely folks a little while ago, which I was reminded of when I got it in the mail today! Always fun to open your mailbox and have a piece your own work fall out. :)

On a semi related note, If you mail me a postcard, it will end up on my fridge. and probably stay there until it's my turn to move.

Isaiah 40:31

A fun fathers day gift commission from a friend.

I haven't had a good excuse to draw type for a while, it was fun to work on!

Isaiah 40:31

2012 Steelcase Foundation Annual Report

The annual report that Rachel Hyde (of Hyde Creative) and I made for the Steelcase Foundation last year won a Silver Addy, so we needed to come up with something even more fantastic this year.

The report includes 5 stories highlighting some of the programs funded by the foundation. The stories chosen this year highlight each of the foundations guiding principals, and we chose to illustrate each of these principals with 3 dimensional stitched letters pulling together lots of brightly patterned new and vintage fabrics.

I love letters, I love fabric, I love stitching, I love tangible objects incorporated into graphic design, I love beautiful, well made things. Needless to say, this was SO MUCH FUN to work on and I am more than happy with the result. Check it out for yourself, but I think we succeeded in surpassing the high bar we set last year.


Stitched fabric letters by me, art direction and design by Rachel Hyde.

See the complete report on Steelcase's website HERE.

cover

Story headline / guiding principal

Story page

Worlds awesomest pie chart. :)

back cover

Look at the color reflected on the paper, so beautiful!

at the photo shoot.

And of course, the necessary cat photo. And some in progress letters.